Contact Book vs Monica (Personal CRM): the honest comparison

Both products want to give you a single calm place to keep the people in your life. Monica gets there with a comprehensive feature surface accumulated over years of community contribution. Contact Book gets there with a sharper, more opinionated subset and a fast UI on top.

The honest take: if you tested both and only had ten minutes per app, you'd probably feel us as faster and Monica as more configurable. Pick whichever feeling matters more.

Monica gives you two ways to run it: self-host it yourself anywhere, or use Monica's own hosted cloud. The self-host route means the data sits wherever you put it - full control. The hosted cloud, by contrast, doesn't publish a hosting location on its pricing page. Ours runs in Germany under German law and we say so plainly. For most users the EU GDPR baseline is the same either way; if you have a requirement that specifically points at Germany - or you just want the location stated, not guessed - that's a clear win for us. Otherwise, treat it as equivalent and pick on UX.

Monica's headline is "free and open-source", and on the self-host route it genuinely is - you pay only for a small server (roughly €5 a month). But free software isn't free time. Self-hosting Monica means you own the Docker stack, the database backups, the SSL renewals, and every version upgrade. Reviewers who've costed this out honestly land around €150-220 a year once you price your own maintenance hours - which is more than Monica's own hosted cloud (about €90 a year), and more than us.

That's the whole pitch in one line: Contact Book is for the person who likes Monica's idea but doesn't want a server in their life. If "Docker Compose" means nothing to you, or you've self-hosted before and are tired of being the on-call admin for your own address book, the hosted route is the right one - and we think we're the calmest version of it.

If you're already on Monica and weighing a move, the honest mechanics matter. Monica's contacts export cleanly as vCard (.vcf) - names, emails, phones, addresses, birthdays - and that file imports straight into Contact Book. Monica also offers a full JSON export (currently a preview feature) and an older SQL dump, but be aware: the JSON has no matching import on Monica's side, and the SQL route is being phased out and skips photos. So the realistic path is vCard for the contact graph, plus a short manual pass to carry over the handful of journal entries, gifts, or notes you actually want to keep.

None of this is a one-click miracle - no personal CRM ingests another's full data model verbatim, and we won't pretend otherwise. But the part that's painful to re-type, the contacts themselves, moves in minutes.

Is Monica still maintained? Yes - actively. It has a large open-source community, regular releases, and is a current, healthy project. We'd never tell you otherwise; this comparison is about shape, not about one product going stale.

Does Monica have a mobile app? Not a first-party native one - you use it in the browser. Contact Book is the same in spirit (web-first), but built mobile-first so the contact card loads fast on a phone. Does either read my email? No. Neither Monica nor Contact Book ingests your inbox - both are deliberate, manual-entry systems, which is the opposite design choice from Cloze.

Which should I actually pick? If you want to own the server, Monica. If you want the idea without the server, us. If you're not sure, our free tier lets you try the hosted experience before you decide.